HELL OR HIGH WATER. MET OPERA HOUSE

Following his Opening Night debut last season with Dead Man Walking, composer Jake Heggie returns to the Met on March 3 for the company premiere of Moby-Dick, his grand adaptation of Herman Melville’s heaven-storming classic. With a libretto by Gene Scheer and an enveloping staging by Leonard Foglia, Heggie’s opera welcomes audiences aboard the Pequod to experience literature’s immortal search for the white whale—and for answers to life’s deepest questions. By Jonathan Minnick

After a harrowing night on the Pequod, as the whaleship rolled wildly in a biblical tempest and the eerie glow of St. Elmo’s fire flickered from the mainmast, Captain Ahab finally spots the white whale. 

Shimmering strings give way to warlike drums and brass as Ahab assembles the crew for battle, while his first mate begs him one last time to call off the ill-fated pursuit. Uniting as one before their encounter with the leviathan, the galvanized whalemen belt out their final refrain—"His blood will end our crusade!”—with rousing outbursts from the orchestra echoing their rallying cry.

 This penultimate sequence from Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick is just one example of the high drama and musical thrill that make the work one of the defining operas of the 21st century, a reputation formed immediately upon its enormously acclaimed maiden voyage at the Dallas Opera in 2010 and burnished by further successes at major houses across the country, including in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago. Now, the opera prepares to drop anchor at the Met, arriving in Leonard Foglia’s celebrated production and featuring an all-star cast with Maestro Karen Kamensek on the podium.

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick chronicles the voyage of the Pequod under the command of the peg-legged, monomaniacal Captain Ahab, consumed by his obsessive pursuit of the white whale that maimed him. 

But in addition to a riveting adventure story, the novel is a profound exploration of human nature and the human condition, touching on the search for truth and wisdom in different spiritual traditions, race relations, America’s place in the world, the values and customs of distant peoples, and philosophical considerations of the ego and self—all of which are present in the opera. 

“The ship is a microcosm of the world,” Heggie says. “Melville made sure all different sorts of cultures, identities, and religions are represented on the journey.”

The idea to adapt Melville’s novel into an opera originated with late playwright Terrence McNally, whom Heggie had worked with on previous projects, including his first opera, Dead Man Walking. 

Though at first intimidated by the scope of such a project, Heggie found tremendous power in how the novel moves between the individual and the collective. “It’s an intimate story where there’s a very clear problem. You’re out on the ocean. There’s no place to turn,” he explains. “You’re surrounded by God knows what—underneath you and above you and within the heart of the person next to you.”………

https://www.metopera.org/discover/articles/hell-or-high